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NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. ix. JUNE 28, 1902.
of these was the Athenaeum, and Mr. Cle*ment
Shorter, in ' A Literary Letter ' in the Sphere
of June 14th, gives a beautiful reproduction
of two illustrations which appeared on the
12th of March, 1831, of the Lowther Arcade
and the improvements at Charing Cross.
Other illustrations included a general plan
and a perspective view engraved on steel
of the new Houses of Parliament. These
engravings attracted great attention, as they
were supplied exclusively to the Athenceum.
They were given with the number for the
21st of May, 1836.
Among incidents which occurred at the coronation of Victoria is one given in the diary of Sir John Bickerton Williams, who was the first knight made by Her Majesty. He occupied a seat in the part of the Abbey allotted to the Royal family. He noticed that " when Her Majesty had to take off her crown to receive the Sacrament, she was obliged to apply both her thumbs to pinch it up ; it appeared rather too tight." Another incident will be remembered, as mentioned in 'The Greville Memoirs,' that the ruby ring was made for the Queen's little finger instead of the fourth, on which the rubric prescribes that it should be put. The Archbishop insisted upon its being placed on the fourth finger, and it was forced on and hurt her very much, and "she was obliged to bathe her finger in iced water in order to get it off." JOHN C. FRANCIS.
THE ' CORONATION ORDER.' It might be
interesting to know whether any effort was
made to normalize the third person singular
inflexions of the verbs. The variety in, e.g.,
the Oblation of the Sword ( ix.), where " the
King ungirds his Sword, and offers it,"
while "the Peer, who first received the Sword, offereth the price of it," is singularly inelegant. And in ' The Queen's Coronation, by the Archbishop of York ' ( xvii.), that prelate, according to the first rubric, saith a prayer, and, according to the last rubric but one, sayeth another prayer.
I am copying from an edition in forty- eight pages, 7f by 5^ in., published at the Oxford University Press, which I understand to be authorized and authentic. O. O. H.
CORONATION DRESS OF THE BISHOPS. An article entitled ' The Coming Coronation,' in the Pall Mall Gazette of 10 June, concludes thus :
" The bishops who are actually officiating are, as has already been announced, to wear splendid copes. The remainder of their brethren, who will be seated upon the north side of the Sacrarium of the Abbey,
will be vested in their usual garb in its rather more
elaborate form that is to say, they will appear not
in the black-and-white ' magpie ' habiliment, but in
their rochets with their scarlet chimeres, such as
they wear at Convocation, placed over them. We
fear that the unhappy precedent of the last three
or four coronations respecting the headdress of the
Episcopal bench will be followed. We can hardly
imagine anything more utterly absurd than for a
bishop to place a square cap upon his head at the
very moment when all the temporal peers adorn
themselves with their coronets. The mitre is the
corresponding headgear for the spiritual peerage,
and it is much to be wished that it should figure at
the approaching Coronation. It is quite a mistake
to suppose that this could be in any sense an inno-
vation, for in the interesting volume recently pub-
lished by Messrs. John Murray, entitled * A Foreign
View of England in the Reigns of George I. and
George II.,' the writer, M. Cesar de Saussure, who
happened to be present at the coronation of the
last - named sovereign, distinctly states that the
bishops carried in their hands, during the proces-
sion to the Abbey, mitres composed of cloth of
silver, those of the two primates being made of
cloth of gold. The combination of cap and cope
which it appears the bishops are going to affect on
June 26 will hardly, we fear, be conducive to greater
dignity."
In the official programme of George IV. 's coronation the archbishops and bishops are described as being "in their rochets with their caps in their hands." As the rochet, a surplice open at the sides, is in the case of the officiating bishops to give way to splendid copes, it seems a great pity that the caps should be worn instead of the far more in- teresting and appropriate mitres. There seems to be no historical reason for the use of the caps, and they are infinitely less dig- nified. CHARLES HIATT.
AN ODE or WELCOME TO THE PRINCESS ALEXANDRA. There are some readers of
- N. & Q.' who may like to be reminded, or
who may be interested to learn if they are not aware, that in the opinion of one of the ablest literary critics of the day, the best verses written on the occasion of the betrothal and wedding of King Edward VII. and his onsort were not those of Tennyson or of the Honourable Mrs. Norton, but the * Wel- come ' which came from the pen of the late William Forsyth, editor of the Aberdeen Journal. Forsyth, it may be stated, assisted Dr. Robert Carruthers in the preparation of the first edition of ' Chambers's Cyclopaedia of Literature,' issued in 1842. Thackeray was one of the earliest to discern the genius of the North-Country journalist, who contributed to the Cornhill while conducted by the great novelist, and whose volume, 'Idylls and Lyrics,' is worthy of wider acquaintance than it has lad. The ' Welcome ' consists of six stanzas ; and the following is not only typical, but
